CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The precinct had grown louder while she'd been in her own headphones, trilling, someone laughing too loudly two rooms away, the squeak of a dolly wheel as an intern pushed a cart of files down the hallway. But inside Kate's little workspace, the air felt eerily still. A bubble. A pressure chamber.
The berries on the monitor stared back at her.
She shifted her weight, leaned in, then leaned back again. She’d changed the zoom level at least a dozen times and gotten nothing for her trouble except a headache blooming behind her eyes.
What are you?
She whispered it aloud, not expecting an answer.
Her fingers drummed once on the desk, frustration prickling beneath her skin. If she knew the species — if she knew what the artist meant by them — maybe the whole pattern would tilt into sense.
She’d tried a reverse google image search and received just under a dozen conflicting answers, ranging from common blackberries to the Macedonian chert-fruit and the fleshy outer casing of the karuka nut. Nothing linked back to crows or grief, death, filial obligations or heraldic symbology.
It was possible, of course, that the painter hadn’t intended any meaning beyond the number of berries.
As Sullivan put it four berries, three crime scenes, meaning there was either another body out there, or there would be.
But that seemed a bit too simple, in Kate’s view.
This was a painter who referenced excerpts from a 14th-century Jewish legal code, who dredged up an obscure medieval nobleman to accompany a murder scene.
There had to be some meaning to those berries, something more than numbers.
A sudden thought flickered.
Dr. Lasker.
The heraldry specialist. The one with the fast-talking warmth and the apologetic energy of a woman stretched thin by academia.
She’d promised — cheerfully — to “ask around” among her colleagues.
And Kate had emailed her images of the third painting, in a bid to chase without seeming to chase.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t elicited a reply.
But it was worth a last try, surely.
Kate grabbed her phone and dialed.
After four rings, the familiar bright voice burst through.
"Agent Valentine! Oh, Lord, I am so sorry. I meant to call you, and then I had eight mid-term papers land on my desk like a Biblical plague. I swear, teaching is just filling in forms while your real research dreams quietly die—sorry, that’s bleak, ignore me.”
Kate closed her eyes briefly, steadying her voice. “It’s okay. I just wondered if you… I hope you don’t mind me sending you the third painting. I just thought it might be useful if any of your colleagues…”
“Yes I have an answer for you!” Lasker exclaimed, delighted.
“Well— I think I have. Or rather, my colleague does. I was going to send an email, but then I wasn’t sure it was important enough, then I got distracted writing comments on an essay comparing medieval tinctures to Pokémon types—long story—and the email never got written. Sorry!”
“Dr. Lasker,” Kate said, keeping her tone level, patient, “what did you find?”
“Oh! Right.” Another bright breath. “So, I showed the images to my colleague, Dr. Travanti. Wonderful man. He’s from Como — you know, in Italy? Where they still make silk? That’s the link to the plants.” She paused expectantly.
Kate frowned. “I’m not following.”
“No, of course not, I’m rambling. Let me explain. Silkworms feed exclusively on mulberry leaves. That’s why mulberry groves were planted all over regions with silk industries — feed the worms, feed the looms.”
Kate felt her pulse pick up. “Okay…”
“And crows,” Lasker continued, “are a nightmare for silk production. They eat silkworms like popcorn, and they adore mulberries themselves. The fruit is very distinctive — deep purple, almost black, depending on ripeness. Dr. Travanti took one look at your drawings and said, ‘Mulberries.’ Instantly.”
Kate stared at the screen.
Her mouth had gone dry.
“In Dr. Travanti’s region they call crows il diav’li alati.
Winged devils.” Lasker chattered on brightly, unaware of the grenade she’d just dropped, “I haven’t had a chance to revisit the images, but the berries — they looked purplish, didn’t they?
Segmented, like raspberries are. That’s mulberries. Does that help at all?”
Silence.
Kate forced air into her lungs. “Yes,” she said faintly. “It does. Thank you.”
"Oh, wonderful! I'll dig further if you need anything else — just call, or email, or if I forget again, call louder—”
“Thank you,” Kate said again, softer.
She ended the call.
For a moment she simply sat there, staring at the black screen of her phone, wishing she hadn’t hung up so quickly.
Lasker’s voice had been warm, kind, full of unselfconscious enthusiasm.
It reminded her of her mother’s friends growing up — linguistics department dinners with mismatched wine glasses and arguments about Chomsky.
A world she’d stepped out of long ago, trading books and seminar tables for guns and autopsies and silence-filled rooms like this one.
Why did I ever leave it?
She shivered, pushing the thought away. She knew why she’d left it.
Because Dad. Because a good man was slaughtered as he stepped out of a church. Because of a mystery that remained unanswered, but had twisted her life out of recognition.
Close to your heart.
Then she looked again at the drawings.
Mulberries.
And suddenly the room seemed to tilt.
Gabe had been right — not about his medieval saint nonsense, but right about something else. Right that this case, like Cox had warned, was going to cut close to her. Right about Chicago.
Mulberries had been the name of her childhood home — the old clapboard house just outside Lake Forest, Illinois.
She hadn’t said the name aloud in years.
Her father had chosen it. The old sign had peeled and warped with the Illinois winters, and her mother had gotten a new one, the name carved on a little wooden sign they hung over the mailbox.
She fumbled for her phone, pulled up Google Maps, typed the address.
It came up instantly.
Still there.
1508 Clancy’s Drive. Still called Mulberries.
Her heart thudded once, hard.
The berries.
Four.
The shift in the third image — the crow angled differently, the fruit overworked, emphasized.
A hint.
A message.
A threat.
Or an invitation.
Her stomach turned.
Someone’s life could be at stake.
And that — that was pure Cox. Or whoever worshipped him enough to continue the cycle. To pull her into the killing by referencing her past. To make her culpable by design.
Because he had done that all along — this grotesque performance of making her a "witness."
The past bleeding into the present.
Her life threaded into the narrative without her consent.
Like Gabe had said. Why did she imagine that had stopped? Just because she’d told Cox she didn’t care? He didn’t care that she didn’t care. More to the point, he knew she did care. Couldn’t not. Cared, and always would. Was powerless to switch it off.
Cold dread licked the back of her neck.
She grabbed her phone and dialed the FBI’s Chicago field office.
It rang once. Twice. Three times.
Her voice was hoarse when the operator picked up.
“This is Special Agent Kate Valentine,” she said. “Badge 0914-BQ. I need immediate local deployment to an address in Lake Forest. Possible imminent threat to life. I need units there now.”
She pressed her palm hard over her eyes, willing the pounding in her skull to stop.
Please, she thought.
Please let me not be too late.
*
The hire car skimmed along the two-lane road like an afterthought, a red speck flicked against the soft sprawl of northern Illinois.
Even at seventy miles an hour, the landscape seemed to unspool in slow motion around her: wide, rolling fields that hadn’t yet surrendered their last pockets of spring green, barn roofs sun-bleached to a pewter sheen, the early summer haze trembling just above the grass.
Wind curled over the car’s hood, warm as breath, and surged through the half-open window, carrying hints of lilac and cut hay.
Late May here was lush in a way Kate had forgotten.
Portland’s springs were wet and stubborn; Maine’s, more generally, tended to be thin and hesitant, a season more suggestion than reality.
But Illinois—this part of it, at least—was generous, almost as theatrical in its greening as it was in its apocalyptic winters.
Big-bellied oaks anchored the fields. White fences split the meadows like chalk lines on a teacher’s blackboard. The sky stretched so broadly you could imagine falling upward into it.
For a moment—just one heartbeat—the scene almost seduced her. Pulled her toward nostalgia. A trick. A trap.
She tightened her grip on the wheel until the faux-leather creaked.
Don’t romanticize it, she told herself. Don’t you dare.
The GPS screen glowed mutely beside her, its route a simple arterial line tracing north toward Lake County. Toward Forest Lake. Toward the place she had once called home but had never truly reclaimed, not even in memory. Not even in nightmares.
Her phone, face-down in the cupholder, buzzed again—its frantic, insect-wing vibration muffled against the rubber lining. The screen flashed once against the reflected sunlight. She didn’t have to look to know the name.
Marcus.
Before that: Winters.
Before that: Marcus again.
Before that: her mother.
She didn’t check any of them. Couldn’t. The thread of thought tugging her forward would snap the moment she allowed another voice into the car.
She’d been through this before—this spiraling gravitational pull toward the next act in Cox’s grotesque gospel. The sense of being part of something she neither endorsed nor understood, as if simply by having witnessed him, she was now tied to the spreading shadow of his work.
Every other Commandment killing has gone the same way.